Our history

We opened our first British Council office in Kyiv as a result of the countries’ agreement between the United Kingdom and Ukraine on cultural, educational and scientific co-operation between them. The British Council was appointed an agent for forging and promoting those relations.

We gradually opened English Language Resource Centres in Lviv, Odessa, Kharkiv and Donetsk (in sequence of order) and increased our audiences of English language teachers and students to the whole of Ukraine, by offering them access to English language methodology seminars, workshops and language learning and teaching materials, conferences and round tables. We also started promoting arts from the UK all around Ukraine.

We developed our first partnership relations with local cultural venues, with city authorities, local educational institutions (schools and universities), and with younger audiences in all the five cities that we operated in and built our reputation around Ukraine by bringing artists, experts in education and language teaching, media professionals and science academics from the UK to them.

We supported the initiative of the European Union on development of civil society in Ukraine through British Centres of Civic Initiatives that operated in our four regional offices around Ukraine and started our project on English for Peacekeeping Forces.

On 12 April 2000, our wonderful new premises in Podil, Kyiv were opened by Right Hon. Robin Cook, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK.

We moved our operation to the new premises which allowed us to offer our first Teaching Centre English language courses and exams services to wider audiences in Kyiv and to support their learning process by offering access to the latest collections of books, videos and audio materials from the UK and to new communicative approaches of teaching English language.

Our Arts programme brought to Ukraine such companies as Rambert Dance Company, I’Fagiollini singers and The Wallace Collection brass band who travelled around Ukraine with concerts and workshops. We launched our first British Film Festival in Ukraine.

Our Society projects tackled issues of preventing HIV and AIDS, working with people with disabilities, children and youth, young offenders, victims of trafficking and the Ukrainian police development.

Our Science projects started the idea of Green Office in Ukraine, supported projects on environment protection and energy efficiency.
Our information projects travelled to all 25 oblasts of Ukraine in 3 years with Days of Great Britain in each of those oblasts. These projects attracted youth interested in studying in the UK, Ukrainian businesses looking for partnerships with British counterparts, teachers and learners of English all over Ukraine.

Our activities expanded and we collaborated with Ministry of Education on development of English for Specific Purposes curriculum and national curriculum for the Teacher’s retraining Institutes, influenced improvement of English language teachers’ professional skills and development of National qualifications framework and establishing of sector skills councils.

We supported the British government scholarships scheme and administered John Smith Fellowship programme.

Young people in Ukraine benefited from taking part in our capacity building projects: Climate Change, Intercultural Navigators, Active Citizens, Creative Cities, Dreams and Teams, English for Social Entrepreneurship and Connecting Classrooms, Citizens and the State, Belarus Child protection etc.

We started teaching English to very young learners and to corporate clients. More than 700 civil servants in Ukraine went through our English language courses offered to them.

We have tripled the resources we are committing to our Arts programme in Ukraine, to showcase high-quality work from the UK and to help Ukraine strengthen its professional capacity within the cultural sector and creative industries. 

We have launched a substantial theatre programme, ambitious programmes in fashion (in partnership with the British Fashion Council, London Fashion Week and Ukrainian Fashion Week), and design and visual arts (a partnership with Liverpool Biennial and various Ukrainian visual arts’ organisations). Our new Creative Enterprise: Ukraine programme trained over 120 young creative entrepreneurs across Ukraine to help them strengthen and develop their creative businesses. Our music programme Selector is complemented by our Selector Live series, which brings trendy, emerging UK bands to venues across Ukraine. We lead a consortium of European cultural institutes delivering the EU’s Eastern Partnership Culture and Creativity Programme, reforming cultural policy and building capacity within institutions and artists and civil society. 

 We have a strong, 24-year partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science and are contributing to the professional development of all English teachers in the state system and to improved English language learning and testing across the country. We are running a major project to improve the teaching, learning and assessment of English in Ukrainian universities. 

Each term, we teach about 1,000 young learners and 1,000 adults in our Kyiv English language school in Podil and in our new partner premises on the “left bank” at Academy A+. 

Our Exams services offer IELTS testing, UK professional exams such as ACCA and our own Aptis exam. And we are still delivering English language training to nearly 500 senior civil servants annually involved in Ukraine’s European integration.

 In Education and Society areas we are supporting the implementation of the 2014 Law on Higher Education, which aims to transform the university sector in Ukraine. Our focus includes quality assurance at national and institutional levels, leadership development within universities, and support for the development of effective and autonomous university governance.

We are working with student groups across many of our partner universities, to help them rise to the opportunities.

We are providing specific training and contact-making support to many of the 16 higher education institutions displaced from the east of Ukraine

Through our Active Citizens Programme we work with 2,500 youth leaders in facilitation, self-organisation and social action projects who have already involved more than 100,000 other young people in more than 300 social action projects across all regions of Ukraine.

In 2017 we are celebrating our 25th anniversary in Ukraine. To see what we are up to nowadays find out about current projects and learning opportunities.